The Accidental Tourist

The Accidental Tourist

“That’s him alright,” the man says, looking over the body in ICU. His face threatens to shatter from grief and then something snaps inside him. He has always been very guarded, afraid of emotions and exposure but now a real ice age sets in, and after a year his wife tells him she is filing for divorce. It’s because he can’t seem to feel anything.

“The Accidental Tourist” begins with this kind of emotional sterility, and the whole movie is a trip toward a smile at the end.

The man is named Macon Leary (William Hurt), and he writes travel books for people who hate to travel. He tells them how to avoid all human contact, where to find “American food” overseas, how to pretend they never left home. His life is also a journey of sorts, maybe it began in childhood; his sister and two brothers still live together in the house where they were raised any life outside their routine would be inconceivable.

His wife (Kathleen Turner) moves out on him; she leaves the dog, Edward, who likes to travel but has had his little canine mind permanently warped by what passes for a normal environment among these people; he barks at ghosts and snaps at strangers. Macon needs to make another one of those overseas research trips right away so he takes the dog out to be boarded at a kennel and that’s where he meets Muriel Pritchett (Geena Davis). Muriel has Macon’s number from the moment he walks through the door; she can tell he’s basket case but she thinks she can help; also her little boy needs a father.

He isn’t so sure about either one of these propositions: He doesn’t dial her phone number later on. But maybe it’s when the dog trips him up causing him to break his leg that night when he takes Edward back out there to be boarded again or something like that, this time submitting himself to a little obedience training: He agrees to admit that Muriel exists, and soon they are sort of living together (lust is still in his body but it lurks so far from the center of his feelings that sex doesn’t seem to cheer him up much).

The strangeness of these middle sections of the movie is that they’re so cheerful, and sometimes very funny, when Macon himself is in a deep depression. Davis, as Muriel, brings a spontaneous wackiness to her role in scenes like the one where she sings at the top of her lungs while doing the dishes. But she’s not as simple as she sometimes seems: When Macon gets carried away with a little sentimental generalizing about the future, she warns him, “Don’t make promises to my son that you are not prepared to keep.”

There’s also great good humor among the characters in Macon’s family: brothers Porter (David Ogden Stiers) and Charles (Ed Begley Jr.) and sister Rose (Amy Wright), a matriarch who feeds the family, presides over their incomprehensible card games and supervises such traditional activities as alphabetizing the groceries on the kitchen shelves.

One evening Macon takes his publisher, Julien (Bill Pullman), home to dinner and Julien falls thunderstruck in love with Rose. He eventually marries her; but a few weeks later Julien tells Macon that Rose has moved back home with the boys; she was afraid they had stopped eating regular meals and were living only on gorp.

This emergency sets off what is perhaps the emotional turning point of this film–subtle but unmistakable. No one knows Rose better than Macon does, so he gives Julien some very specific advice: “Call her up and tell her your business is going to pieces. Ask if she could just come in and get things organized. Get things under control. Put it that way.

Use those words. ‘Get things under control,’ tell her.” It’s hilarious in context; but it’s also funny because for once it’s an action by which Macon extends himself for someone else even starting him on the road toward emotional growth. Clinging to his protection of sterility and loneliness, he does n’t at first realize that he’s turned the corner yet; he still doubts that he needs Muriel, and when she buys herself a ticket and follows him to Paris, he wants nothing to do with her.

When his wife shows up in Paris too there’s a moment when he thinks they might be able to patch things together again then finally Macon comes to exactly the sort of moment in which he’s been avoiding all his life having one: He has to choose. But by then it is obvious what the choice is; already made, by having looked out of his shell so briefly.

The screenplay for “The Accidental Tourist,” by Kasdan and Frank Galati, is able to reproduce a lot of the tone and dialogue of Anne Tyler’s novel without simply being a movie version of a book. The textures are too specific and the humor is too quirky and well-timed for that. They’ve reinvented the same story in their own terms. The movie represents a reunion for Kasdan, Hurt and Turner who all three launched their careers with “Body Heat” (1981). Kasdan used Hurt again in “The Big Chill” (1983) and knows how to use that gift of Hurt’s for somehow being likable even while appearing withdrawn.

It is almost impossible to achieve what Hurt did here: for the majority of the film he is depressed, underplayed and so private it’s like he’s invisible, yet still we care about him. What Kasdan does is even more difficult; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that was so sad and so funny at the same time. ‘The Accidental Tourist’ is one of my favorite movies this year.

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